FOC celebrates 10 years @ Helsinki Design Week

Janne thought it would be nice to go back to their roots and showcase a decade of thier work during the recent Helsinki Design Week ( a city-wide event, encompassing design, architecture and fashion ). Helsinki Design Week offers visitors exhibitions, seminars, workshops, fashion shows and shopping experiences, as well as open days in private homes, public buildings and design studios.

Janne Kyttanen

The 200 square meter exhibition space displayed several products from the FOC Collection as well as provided a sneak preview of new products to be launched shortly.

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As part of their 10 year anniversary show, Janne Kyttanen gave a intriguing presentation, covering the past 10 years of working in the design industry, and in more detail working with 3D printing technologies.

Janne Kyttanen

WHO IS JANNE?

Janne Kyttanen was born 1974 in Hameenlinna, Finland.

He started his industrial design studies at the Escola De Disseny, Elisave in Barcelona 1996.

He then moved to The Netherlands and graduated from The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam 2000, where he also currently lives.

Right after his graduation he started working for a number of interior, product and lighting design projects for clients in the banking, public transport, aviation, consumer electronics and cosmetics industries. After a few years, he got bored with traditional design approaches and wanted to go back to what we was busy with during his design studies.

During his studies Janne proved the potential of using 3D printing techniques as a source for manufacturing his designs. He introduced a line of 3D printed products as his thesis for graduation. This project laid the foundation for Freedom Of Creation (FOC), a company specializing in the design with 3D printing techniques, which Janne founded in Helsinki, Finland (2000).

Due to the immense global potential of this concept, Janne has put most of his design and entrepreneurial efforts in FOC during the recent years.

AWARDS

Janne has been presented with numerous design awards including, Best New Corner Award 100% Design 2003, Red Dot Design Award 2005, Best New Exhibitor Award 100% Design 2005 and Interior Innovation Award Cologne 2006. Janne was also selected as the Young Designer of the Year by the Design Forum Finland 2007.

Freedom of Creation: The Future is Here

The process is simple.

Make a 3D CAD file of your design, upload the file to a 3D printing machine, and print out your idea. Simple, yet mindblowing. Anything you can envision and be designed and created right in front of you.

The design company Freedom of Creation, founded by Janne Kyttanen, who also serves as Creative Director, believes that this technology will give us a future where people will be able to own their own 3D printer, see a product they want on the internet, and download it and print it at home. Imagine designing your dinner dishes and eating utensils and printing them for dinner. Or designing an outfit just for a special occasion and printing it out.

Freedom of Creation, or FOC, uses this process to make lamps, jewellery, shoes, furniture, and so much more. Or, to be more precise, to make design models of them.

The design model is the real breakthrough. Instead of years of product development, a CAD model can be made inexpensively, with just intelligence and creativity. Production can be dropped down to hours. Anything can be scanned and printed with plastic, metal, rubber or ceramic in another location, identically or with digital editing. A foot can be scanned to make a perfect shoe for it. And models can be ordered and shipped anywhere, digitally—no expensive logistics needed. Just order the file.

Kyttanen has made the point that this technology may be the solution for waste. The company wanted a green way of making products, and this may be the greenest. Instead of producing hundreds of plastic lawn gnomes that are stored in a warehouse, transported over thousands of kilometers, and then thrown away after not being sold, if only one is needed, only one can be printed out, anywhere in the world.

This main exhibition of HDW2010 will feature prototypes and products from Freedom of Creation, reflecting its history and the incredible creativity behind the business of 3D design. FOC are famous for their geometric and organic forms, sometimes seeming to come from delicate natural processes and sometimes from pure mathematics. Tables look like lacework, and rings have spirals or small sculptures built right in. The wall sconces are fantasies of complex flowers or shelled sea creatures. See why FOC and Janne Kyttanen have been presented with numerous design awards, why their work is in the MOMA and other top design museums, and why companies like Nokia and Apple are beating down their door. See the future.

We are crowdsourcing partners for our 10 year anniversary book 2010. Do you want to be part of this as a publisher, graphic designer or an advertiser?

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Revolutions seldom happen… but a new one is well on its way, and we are the pioneers.

Not long ago, the norm was months or even years for the development and market analysis of even a simple new product, and designers were able to produce only a handful of products during their careers.

New production technologies involving 3D printing are changing many realities for today’s designers and manufacturers. The possibilities enabled by these new tools and the ability to consider production in terms of days, or even hours, is simply mind-boggling. Be it modification, adaptation or production speed – the dramatic reduction in “time to market” is allowing technology to outrun traditional marketing strategies and keep in touch with consumer trends in new product demand – and thus begging the question if today’s current manufacturing infrastructure might also be rapidly becoming outdated.

There is no longer time for designs to grow over the course of many years into “design classics”, as they did in the past. Tangible products will become the future design classics – a type of digitalization process that has already transpired with a variety of commercial products (literature, music, photography, money etc.). This digitalization process will change our lives in ways that is hard for us to even fathom.

Freedom Of Creation (FOC) started its journey as a student design project by Janne Kyttanen in 1999. During his graduation year 2000, Kyttanen founded FOC as a company specializing in the design with 3D printing, and adopted the nomenclature ’3D printing’ to help visually describe the various techniques encompassed in these technologies.

FOC is a true pioneer and the first company to successfully commercialize design products made via layer manufacturing, “10 years designing by the layers” features several case studies – some of which have already become 21st century communication and design icons – from the lighting, packaging, gift, fashion and other design fields, executed for an array of multinational clients such as Hyundai, LVMH, Nike, Onitsuka Tiger, L’Oreal, Heineken and Apple

B&B Italia is still a business projecting itself toward the future with its people, production places, ideas, projects and products, market strategies. At the heart of the events and activities planned for the B&B Italia 50th anniversary there is the deep acknowledgement of the company’s history and contemporary identity.

What better way to mark its 50th anniversary than with more exciting projects which are rooted in the company’s past but aimed at future challenges ?

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